Decibel: The Relational Dataset Branching System

Summary: Relational dataset branching with built-in version control enables concurrent analysis and provenance tracking. Evaluates three versioned storage engines for fast queries and low storage, plus an exhaustive benchmark for future design. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hd730a3c2d7bf051a
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2016
Pagerank: 8.6729094e-05
Overall Rank: 2,296 | 84.62%
DOI: 10.14778/2947618.2947619
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Michael Maddox (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. David Goehring (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
3. Aaron J. Elmore (University of Chicago)
4. Samuel Madden (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
5. Aditya Parameswaran (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
6. Amol Deshpande (University of Maryland)

BibTeX Citation

@article{maddox_vldb16,
        title = {{Decibel: The Relational Dataset Branching System}},
        author = {Maddox, Michael and Goehring, David and Elmore, Aaron J. and Madden, Samuel and Parameswaran, Aditya and Deshpande, Amol},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '16},
        volume = {9},
        number = {9},
        pages = {624--635},
        doi = {10.14778/2947618.2947619},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2947618.2947619},
        year = {2016}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 18 of 18 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
972	The Data Civilizer System	2017	CIDR	0.00012742827
1,699	MISTIQUE: A System to Store and Query Model Intermediates for Model Diagnosis	2018	SIGMOD	9.8230859e-05
1,878	Ground: A Data Context Service	2017	CIDR	9.431234e-05
2,001	OrpheusDB: Bolt-on Versioning for Relational Databases	2017	VLDB	9.2020796e-05
3,287	ForkBase: An Efficient Storage Engine for Blockchain and Forkable Applications	2018	VLDB	7.4411317e-05
4,687	Data Platform for Machine Learning	2019	SIGMOD	6.4518327e-05
4,802	Improving Reproducibility of Data Science Pipelines through Transparent Provenance Capture	2020	VLDB	6.3924551e-05
5,137	ORPHEUSDB: A Lightweight Approach to Relational Dataset Versioning	2017	SIGMOD	6.244375e-05
5,277	Dagger: A Data (not code) Debugger	2020	CIDR	6.1853307e-05
6,062	Your notebook is not crumby enough, REPLace it	2020	CIDR	5.8829004e-05
6,667	Hindsight Logging for Model Training	2021	VLDB	5.6985871e-05
6,888	Analysis of Indexing Structures for Immutable Data	2020	SIGMOD	5.6394555e-05
7,469	DEX: Query Execution in a Delta-based Storage System	2017	SIGMOD	5.50341e-05
8,016	TardisDB: Extending SQL to Support Versioning	2021	SIGMOD	5.3910163e-05
9,329	DataDiff: User-Interpretable Data Transformation Summaries for Collaborative Data Analysis	2018	SIGMOD	5.1800142e-05
10,172	Optimizing Time Series Queries with Versions	2024	SIGMOD	5.0559291e-05
11,147	Generic Version Control: Configurable Versioning for Application-Specific Requirements	2025	CIDR	4.9605343e-05
11,316	Vive la Différence: Practical Diff Testing of Stateful Applications	2025	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
19	A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels	1995	SIGMOD	0.00058631912
715	Archiving Scientific Data	2002	SIGMOD	0.00014558752
725	Serializable Snapshot Isolation in PostgreSQL	2012	VLDB	0.00014434166
1,089	DataHub: Collaborative Data Science & Dataset Version Management at Scale	2015	CIDR	0.00012062983
1,362	Principles of Dataset Versioning: Exploring the Recreation/Storage Tradeoff	2015	VLDB	0.0001088824
2,037	Change-Centric Management of Versions in an XML Warehouse	2001	VLDB	9.135023e-05
2,857	Transaction Time Indexing with Version Compression	2008	VLDB	7.9152217e-05
3,084	Performance Evaluation of a Temporal Database Management System	1986	SIGMOD	7.6479922e-05
3,216	Fully Persistent B+-trees	1991	SIGMOD	7.5114236e-05
3,742	The BT-Tree: A Branched and Temporal Access Method	2000	VLDB	7.0380553e-05
7,179	Minuet: A Scalable Distributed Multiversion B-Tree	2012	VLDB	5.5769584e-05

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1	5,137	ORPHEUSDB: A Lightweight Approach to Relational Dataset Versioning	2017	SIGMOD
2	8,170	DeltaNI: An Efficient Labeling Scheme for Versioned Hierarchical Data	2013	SIGMOD
3	7,230	Dataset Relationship Management	2019	CIDR
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5	8,016	TardisDB: Extending SQL to Support Versioning	2021	SIGMOD
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7	2,001	OrpheusDB: Bolt-on Versioning for Relational Databases	2017	VLDB
8	1,362	Principles of Dataset Versioning: Exploring the Recreation/Storage Tradeoff	2015	VLDB
9	13,841	Effective Data Versioning for Collaborative Data Analytics	2020	SIGMOD
10	1,089	DataHub: Collaborative Data Science & Dataset Version Management at Scale	2015	CIDR